Conclusion

After releasing the GeForce 6800 GS late last year which slid roughly right in between the GeForce 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra in performance, we were beginning to wonder if NVIDIA were ever truly going to replace the GeForce 6600 GT. It was almost as if the 6600 GT had been forgotten. Well, after running the GeForce 7600 GT through a gamut of benchmarks, we can definitely say that NVIDIA hasn’t forgotten about the mainstream price segment, as the GeForce 7600 GT is another killer $200 GPU offering from NVIDIA.

You saw the benchmarks. The GeForce 7600 GT easily outperformed the GeForce 6800 GS in all our tests. Whether it was a shader model 3.0 test or not, OpenGL vs Direct3D, AA or no AA, even in HDR testing the GeForce 7600 GT came out ahead of the GeForce 6800 GS. The most amazing thing about it is that the GeForce 7600 GT manages to pull it off with considerably less memory bandwidth (thanks to its 128-bit memory interface) and only 12 pipelines.

ATI tried to throw a curveball at NVIDIA with the Radeon X1800 GTO, but based on our testing, it looks like the GeForce 7600 GT knocked them out of the park, as the X1800 GTO doesn’t have a clear performance advantage in comparison to the 7600 GT, in fact it’s outrun by the NVIDIA card in most of our benchmarks. On top of this, the X1800 GTO costs more and doesn’t have a dongle-less CrossFire solution. We’ll be taking a more in-depth look at the X1800 GTO later this month once retail cards from ATI’s board partners are available.

In case you were wondering about other GeForce 7600 GT variants to come down the pipeline, NVIDIA hasn’t announced anything yet. Today’s G73 launch only includes the GeForce 7600 GT on the PCI Express interface. Those of you hoping for an AGP version should cross your fingers and make your voice heard. With so much performance coming from such a diminutive package we think there would be huge demand for an AGP GeForce 7600 GT card, but perhaps that’s just us. We also can’t wait to see what NVIDIA does with latter 7600 variants, hopefully NVIDIA won’t chop too much off these boards.

Anyone in the market for a new $200 graphics card though should definitely consider NVIDIA’s GeForce 7600 GT. This card is definitely one of the best buys to come along since the GeForce 6600 GT, and the GeForce4 Ti 4200 before that. NVIDIA’s legacy for building compelling mainstream GPUs definitely lives on.